Happy Holidays from the Cohen Lab! Here’s a picture from our lab holiday party this month. We enjoyed spending time together and are looking forward to more science in the new year!

Dr. Cohen and her collaborators, Drs. Shankar Bhamidi, Eran Dayan, and Keely Muscatell, were recently awarded a UNC Computational Medicine Program Pilot Award to study neural and cognitive changes that occur in breast cancer patients after treatment with chemotherapy. This research aims to understand the brain network mechanisms underlying cognitive changes after treatment and to improve how these changes are assessed and identified.
You can see the websites for Dr. Cohen’s collaborators below:
https://shankarbhamidi.web.unc.edu/
https://dayanlab.web.unc.edu/
https://carolinasnhlab.com/

First time back at the neuroimaging center after a long hiatus! As we are preparing to resume testing for our BrainMAP study again, who better to receive a practice MRI scan than our team leader – Dr. Jessica Cohen. We are excited to work with our wonderful participants and their families again soon!

Arianna Cascone wins Best Graduate Student Poster at the annual Triangle Society for Neuroscience meeting for her work assessing functional network organization in individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD). PD is characterized by a range of motor and non-motor symptoms, including cognitive decline.Using resting-state fMRI data collected from individuals with PD with and without cognitive decline, we examined whether topological brain-network resilience contributes to protection against cognitive decline in PD. Relative to individuals with PD experiencing cognitive decline, the frontoparietal network in cognitively stable individuals with PD is significantly more resilient to network perturbation. The topological robustness of the frontoparietal network may contribute to protection against cognitive decline in individuals with PD.

Congratulations Arianna!

Erika has been an RA in the Cohen Lab for two years. She is a junior majoring in Psychology with a minor in Neuroscience. This fall she began an independent research project investigation emotion dysregulation in adolescents. Specifically, she is investigating the relationship between emotion dysregulation and aggression and how executive function deficits may modulate this relationship. After graduating, she hopes to go on and get a PhD in either clinical or cognitive psychology. In her free time, she enjoys playing piano, doing photography, spending time with friends, and exploring new places.

Dr. Sikoya Ashburn, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab, was named as a Rising Star on Cell Mentor’s list of 1,000 Inspiring Black Scientists in the U.S.! You can see the complete list here: https://crosstalk.cell.com/blog/1000-inspiring-black-scientists-in-america. Congratulations, Sikoya!

Caroline Hoch graduated in May 2020 with a major in Neuroscience and minors in Biology and Spanish for the Medical Professions. She was a member of the Cohen Lab from Fall 2016-Spring 2020 and took on an independent project during her senior year, in which she explored the reliability of the current ADHD neurocognitive profiles. She found that heterogeneity exists within both ADHD and typically developing populations, especially in measures of affective processing, risk taking, and executive control. Caroline remains on the pre-med track, and is currently conducting clinical research in orthopaedics at the Medical University of South Carolina.

The Cohen Lab attended Flux Virtual Congress 2020 from September 9th to September 12th. We are honored to continue learning about the most recent advancements and research in developmental cognitive neuroscience, and to contribute to this community by presenting and discussing our own research. Click here if you are interested in checking out our recorded poster presentations on Youtube!

• Dr. Nicholas Fogleman: Neural correlates underlying irritability and emotion dysregulation in children with and without ADHD.
• Dr. Teague Henry: The effects of methylphenidate on the functional controllability of the brain in children with ADHD.
• Mac Woodburn: Reconfiguration of functional brain networks from resting-state to task during childhood is associated with motor learning and working memory.
• Mackenzie Mitchell: Rewards drive reconfiguration of whole brain networks in children.
• Cleanthis Michael: Disrupted brain network reconfiguration between resting and cognitive control task states across changing cognitive demands in children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
• Cheyenne Bricken: Brain network organization and cognitive performance during childhood.

University of North Carolina Chapel Hill

 
Ananyaa Sundar is majoring in Neuroscience and minoring in Chemistry, and is on the pre-med track. As a member of the Cohen Lab, she is interested in learning about brain development. In her free time, Ananyaa enjoys baking, watching movies, and hanging out with friends.

Email: ananyaa@live.unc.edu

North Carolina School of Science & Mathematics 20′ (NCSSM)